


Don't You Forget

by FluffyBeaumont



Category: Rocketman (2019)
Genre: Addiction, Friends to Lovers, Hospitals, M/M, Recovery, Rehabilitation, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:02:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24331015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FluffyBeaumont/pseuds/FluffyBeaumont
Summary: The hardest part of recovery is admitting you have a problem, but Elton's day-to-day in rehab is tempered with bad memories and the pain of missing Bernie.
Relationships: Elton John/Bernie Taupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Don't You Forget

**Author's Note:**

> I deliberately avoided using quotation marks in this piece, so as to preserve the stream-of-consciousness flow.

The first day wasn’t so bad, if you discounted the utter crushing boredom of sitting on a bed and staring at nothing except the same four walls. He’d arrived early in the morning, shortly after sunrise. Reid said it was better that way, fewer rubberneckers hanging about and gawping, although truth be told he hardly looked like himself anymore, so who the fuck was going to know? The food, though, was nothing to write home about. That was probably the worst part. And he couldn’t have anything he liked, but he knew that before he came here. _You can’t always get what you want._ No, he hated that fucking song.

They eased you in here. Except for the demure little person who’d taken his name and personal belongings, he’d seen no one, not even a doctor. That was odd, but not unwelcome. He didn’t need a doctor. He knew what his problem was. Problems, plural. He went along all right the first day by keeping himself busy, reading the stack of books he’d brought, paging through the newspapers and magazines provided in the common room. He took the ones he fancied and brought them back with him, shut the door. It wasn’t shut five minutes before someone tapped on it and told him he was supposed to leave it open.

What about if I’m taking a shit? He wanted to know. Should I leave that door open as well, or…? It was like picking at a scab you knew you weren’t supposed to touch. He couldn’t resist.

Please, leave the door open. It’s for your own safety.

Oh, I’m safe as houses in here. You can bet on that.

Around four o’clock – he got as far as four o’clock, which was really something, considering – he started wanting it. He went to the front desk and very politely asked to use the phone. Of course they wouldn’t let him. He knew that. Didn’t hurt to ask, though. Never know what you might get by asking. He didn’t really believe this.

How long are you going to keep me prisoner?

You aren’t a prisoner.

That’s what they all say.

He left the desk and went back to his room, sat down on the bed, his hands on his knees. I can do this.

Oh don’t be so bloody stupid. The voice in his head sounded oddly like his mother, but it always did. It always had. It always would.

No, seriously.

Fuck off, you fucking wanker. Now the voice sounded like Reid. You just want the phone so you can call and get some. You think they’re going to let you have it, in this place? You’re fucking deluded.

Ten past four he was climbing the walls. He left his room, went out and walked the corridor for a bit. The tiled floors were slippery where someone had been mopping. They made you work here, and you had to earn your privileges. Once you’d got settled in, someone came round with a work rota and told you what your job was, and you said yes sir no sir three bags full sir. If he slipped on the wet floor and, say, broke his leg, what would they say to him then?

It’s your own fucking fault.

Yeah, probably.

It’s your own fucking fault you’re in here.

Nobody can force you. That’s what they told him. But you’re better off. It looks a lot more like contrition this way, like you’re sorry for what you did. Sorry for being the way you are. Like you mean it this time. Like you’re going to change, for real. A proper change.

I know what contrition means. I’m not a blithering idiot.

Fifteen minutes past four he started biting his nails, an old habit. He stopped a woman passing in the hallway with a laundry cart.

What time do they eat here?

Dinner is at six.

No, dinner is at dinner time, noon, or shortly afterwards. You eat dinner in the middle of the day, you fucking moron. He despised the American custom of calling supper something other than it was.

His insults bounced right off her: The evening meal is six o’clock.

I have important things to do.

Not in here you don’t. And she was gone.

They brought him dinner on a tray in his room at six: hot veg, a meat patty, a bottle of Perrier with the cap removed. Were they afraid he’d swallow it? A small dish of fresh blueberries. That was it. He scarfed the whole lot of it, was starving again half an hour later when they came to get the tray.

Can I have use the phone?

You know you can’t.

I’m still hungry.

I’m sorry.

You don’t look very fucking sorry. Listen here, I want a sweet for my afters. Cake or ice cream or something.

But they wouldn’t give it to him.

One time he was in Paris, staying at a chic small hotel around the corner from the most astonishing small restaurant. He ordered oysters and they brought him as many as he wanted, tray after tray after tray, oysters on the half-shell, nestled in a bed of crushed ice. He washed them down with champagne, bottles and bottles of it, ice cold, then called Faustina’s and asked them to send someone. A young Tunisian arrived at his suite, didn’t speak a word of English, but when had that ever mattered? 

For years afterwards, the salty taste of oysters reminded him of cum.

Early in the morning on the second day he was very sick. Head-down, vomiting noisily into the toilet, chundering his guts out. He rinsed his mouth with tap water and staggered back to bed. Then the chills started: long, violent shudders that tingled in his scalp and raced up and down his arms and legs, like someone pouring cold water over him. A man came with hot chicken broth but he couldn’t keep it down, vomited it all down the front of his hospital-issue pajamas along with a quantity of bile.

I’m sick. Why won’t you give me something?

I sympathise, I really do. The doctor was young, Middle Eastern, very good looking. But this is the only way.

You’re a goddamn liar!

Please, try and rest.

I don’t want to rest.

But he did. He was fucking exhausted. He crawled into bed and shivered, huddling under the extra blankets they brought him, which didn’t help. It’s so cold. I’m so cold. Can’t they turn the bloody heat up in here? He cried himself to sleep that night.

He spent the third day slipping in and out of consciousness, his body racked by chills and burning up with fever. A doctor came and started IV fluids, and for a while he felt better. In a rare moment of clarity, he reflected that perhaps he could have exercised better judgement in the past. But that sort of thinking was entirely beside the point. He dreamed he was lying in a hospital while Reid came and sneered at him, saying this was just like him and didn’t he always take everything too far?

Doesn’t matter if you kick it, Reid told him. I’ll still get my twenty percent even when you’re dead.

Am I dead now? He couldn’t be entirely sure either way. He asked the doctor why he felt so awful.

Your body is purging itself of the drugs. We’re giving you extra fluids to help you do that.

On the fourth day he sat up in bed and drank the chicken soup they brought and kept it down. In the afternoon a woman arrived and said it was time to talk. 

About what? he asked.

Why you’re here, she told him.

I think we both know the answer to that. He said it without a trace of irony.

It’s good that you’re able to face the truth, she said. This is a good beginning. She said it so kindly that it made him cry.

On the fifth day, they said he was well enough to go to a meeting, so he did, but walking into that room, with all the chairs arranged in a circle, was worse than that night at the Troubadour. They were all looking at him, of course, but that wasn’t a big deal. He’d spent his whole life, almost, being looked at. Most of the time he’d make a joke – about the situation in which he found himself, about his weight, his looks. Everybody would laugh and he’d be off the hook. People were too busy laughing to ask what the hell his last utterance meant, or could he ever be serious about anything. They asked him to introduce himself, say a little something about who he was, and that was just so fucking ludicrous he almost laughed. Are you kidding me, he wanted to say, you know who I am.

It was important they know who he was, these general purpose common-as-dirt bog standard sad addicted bastards.

You aren’t like them, the voice whispered. They’re well and truly fucked. They’ve lost their way. You can quit any time you like—

But he’d tried that. Time after time after tortuous time he’d tried, and in the end the addiction was stronger. He told himself the same lies every addict tells himself.

It’s nothing to do with anyone else.

Nothing to do with anyone: Bernie weeping openly. Please, Reg, I’m begging you. Let’s go away somewhere, just the two of us. We can go to my ranch. We can write the way we used to. Please, I’m begging. You’ve got to stop.

Begging.

He told himself he could never manage his problems if left to his own devices. It wasn’t just that he enjoyed the whole whizz-bang madness; he needed it. As soon as he put away the coke spoon, as soon as he poured the last of his expensive liquor down the drain, as soon as he threw away the mountains of junk food occupying two walk-in refrigerators almost the size of an airport hangar—

—he’d be done for.

He understood after a while that he was supposed to unburden himself, tell these people in group about his ‘demons’. His ‘personal demons’ – that’s what they called it. Well, fuck all that. He wasn’t doing it. They all seemed so sorry for the things they’d done. Good for them. Did they want him to tell them a story? He told them a story, really laid it on thick, about what an absolute shit he’d been, the over-the-top things he’d done and said, and when the meeting was over, he went back to his room and sat on the bed feeling proud of himself. He made them laugh. It was what he did.

On the sixth day, the cravings intensified, and he was nervous, agitated, shit-scared and jumping a mile in the air if someone said so much as ‘boo’. He lay in his bed for hour after endless hour with the lights on, staring at the ceiling, tracking a fly as it circled the room and bashed itself against the window, trying to get out. You can’t get out, you stupid fucker. This is where you’ve landed. This is what you get. _I'm too low for zero/ Insomnia attacks/ Watching flies with my eyes till sunrise/ It's daylight when I hit the sack_

On the seventh day there were church services held in the hospital chapel. Nondenominational, the woman doctor told him. You might want to attend. You might find it uplifting. So just to be perverse he went and sat in a rear pew with his head down, still sick from the effects of his recent detox and feeling like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. He didn’t hear much of what was said and he didn’t bother singing any of the hymns except “Abide With Me”, which they used to always sing when Watford FC played. It all built in him, the emotion he’d been trying to suppress, the emotion he’d been trying to control and manage, and he barely made it back to his room before bursting into noisy sobs. He sat on his bed and rocked back and forth, back and forth, like someone navigating his way through some enormous pain, until at last he cried himself to sleep.

The eighth day was Monday. It was his turn to mop the corridors and the common areas, and he took the mop and bucket without complaint. While he worked, he kept thinking of something Reid used to say, “Don’t you forget, I made you. I made you and I own you.” But Reid didn’t own him, not anymore. Nobody did. He owned himself. Trouble was, he had no idea what to do with this new self he owned.

Give yourself time, the woman doctor said. It will take a while until you can conceptualize a different way of living. It’s early days yet.

That night he dreamed he and Bernie were back in Pinner, living with Derf and Sheila, sleeping in their bunkbeds and writing songs on the old upright in the lounge. He’d always had nightmares, and sometimes he’d awaken to find Bernie sitting beside his bed, palm laid flat against his heart, calming him, soothing him back to sleep with gentleness and words. Sometimes he would cry, but Bernie never made him feel bad about it, never shamed him. Bernie would console him, even crawl into bed beside him and hold him while he cried.

He wished Bernie were here.

On Tuesday the receptionist told him he had a visitor. He didn’t dare to even hope, but when he walked into the common room Bernie was there. He hesitated, wondering if it was okay to hug him, or should he just shake hands but then Bernie crossed the room in two strides and caught him in his embrace and hugged him…

Hugged him so hard and held him so tight.

I love you, man.

Elton pulled back a little, just far enough to see Bernie’s face. But not like that, right?

I just love you. And there was Bernie’s gentle, beautiful smile and Bernie’s hands cupping his face, gazing into his eyes. I just love you, man. I just love you. Don’t you forget.


End file.
